EA Sports PGA Tour Review (lawjax)
Do you like golf? Me neither, but I do enjoy playing golf games. Here's my assessment thus far on EA Sports' PGA Tour - you can decide for yourself where your interest lies. I will try to go in order of which features you are likely to encounter first.
1. Game startup: this game requires you to download EA Play (not to be confused with Origins, but if you have an Origins account then your credentials will still be used to sign into EA Play) to play this game. Furthermore, if you are not connected to EA Servers then you will only be enabled for Quick Play - essentially, you will be unable to use your custom golfer(s) without an Internet connection. I fail to see why you cannot play through your career while offline since career is exclusively single-player. This practice is abhorrent and must stop - people are paying $60-70 for something they may not even be able to play at their own convenience. Terrible business practice; I must be a short-sighted moron because I cannot see the long-term benefits for game developers to adopt and maintain this practice.
2. Character customization: you can have up to 4 custom golfers, each with their own unique apparel and careers, and you can edit the details of said custom golfers at any time. Meaning that if you decide halfway through your career that you have grown tired of playing as bear-bodied man and instead want to play as a strong, confident woman who can drive 290+ yards regularly, you can do so. You can change your golfer's nationality, hometown, and age whenever you please on any of their profiles.
Character customization is limited to 40 different head models for both sexes (or pronouns, as the game calls it - what is a "target demographic" anyway?) with no sculpting ability of your own, 2 different body types (thin and thicc), 3 different swing animations (seems purely cosmetic, but I have only been playing with 1 style so don't quote me), 10 eye colors, 28 hairstyles that are identical across both sexes, 10 different eyebrows, and 14 different hair color options. Men also have 13 facial hair options exclusively (sorry she/hers). Both sexes also have the same 12 caddie options, all of which have the same creepy smile.
Each golfer may have their own career. The stats among them are not shared, nor are the upgrade points you get by playing the game. You earn experience by completing holes and rounds, and you will level fairly quickly when you start touring (level 40 at time of writing this, have a good deal of skills available for my use).
3. Game optimization: the game allows you to optimize how you would like to play it. If you are new to golf games then you can play with the bumpers on and have many tips and trajectory tools at your disposal. If you are experienced at golf then you can choose to play bare-bones in simulation difficulty and do away with shot trajectories and birds' eye view and try to simply read the courses and make good shots. You can practice every course with a variety of modes at your disposal - you can play with live players or with CPU-controlled players (up to 4 in some modes). My personal recommendation is to start with the default difficulty regardless of whether or not you have played golf games before (Pro difficulty). You will get a feel for things by simply playing the game so I'd recommend starting off with less UI assistance in the first place that way you do not feel handicapped when and if you decide to try playing without it in the future.
IMPORTANT: you cannot rebind the controls. All shot planning will be done via arrow keys, 2468 for spin modifiers, home-end to swing, u for shot trajectory overview.
4. Quests & rewards: the game has a "quest system" and offers you rewards (in the form of loot boxes - not kidding). The quests are comprised of winning tournaments, sponsorship challenges, and going through coaching (which I would personally recommend playing through first and foremost anyway, as the coaching mode will give you some great insight into how to play the game... and it will not seem nearly as boring as it will after you've played a tour or 2). The rewards - the loot boxes - will typically reward you with shop points to unlock cosmetics and clubs.
5. Store: as it has come to no-one's great surprise, EA continues its age-old practice of trying to siphon whatever money it can from whoever is willing to pay for instant gratification in the form of store points. There are several different selections to buy from in the store: Specs, Clothing, Equipment, Tickets. There is a "Featured" page which shows any combination of those categories, and lastly a "Points" page, where you can pay real money to get bent over and fucked. Like visiting with a prostitute, except less exciting.
The Specs page offers what appear to be upgrades to your clubs (accuracy/power/control improvements, smaller windows for having mishits) and for your balls (same thing; does not improve performance in bed). Clothing and equipment seem to be purely cosmetic options - neither one matters at all as far as gameplay is concerned. Selection is also quite limited at the time of writing this, but appears to refresh daily with new items/items rotating (doubtless, a ploy to incentivize daily playing/logging in). The Tickets page is for purchasing tickets that can be used to enter weekly and seasonal tournaments; however, you can EARN these by playing (and presumably winning) daily events (which no tickets seem to be required for).
You accumulate shop points by just playing the game, beating its various challenges, going through coachings and events, and then unlock whatever you fancy with the earned points. Something to keep in mind: all of your points are shared across all of your golfers. What you unlock for one you will have access to with any of your other golfers, so no worries about having to grind out the same gear for each individual golfer, but if you buy apparel for your she/her golfer then it'll be coming out of your she/her and your him/his's joint bank account, just like in real life.
6. Gameplay: the most important mark of any game, does it play well? My honest answer to this is yes. This is probably the nearest you can get to playing golf without having to actually play it. The courses are beautiful, the shot mechanics are varied and interesting, the physics are great, and there are plenty of game modes that can keep things fun and interesting (my own playtime has been spent going through career mode so I have yet to experiment too much with the other modes); the commentators/game commentary is initially great, but will become very redundant as time goes on and you improve. Unsure if it was an oversight or if EA was trying to emulate what commenting on real golf is like, but the number of shot-commentary lines are certainly finite. That said, I am still impressed on just how many things get commented on though as far as shots themselves are concerned; the attention to detail in the commentary is top-notch.
There are a surprisingly large amount of challenges that will improve how well you play the game and would serve as great practice if you should want to play seriously online - you unlock various peripherals for completing these challenges (which you can preview in-advance so you waste no time completing challenges for something you do not care about) and garner experience for them as well, leading your golfer to continually level up.
Overall verdict: this is a good, good-looking golf game. You do not need to buy a thing from the store to enjoy the experience (and you will accumulate points anyway to buy the peripheral things by just playing the game anyway). PGA Tour scratches the itch for golfing and if that is all you are looking for then I believe you will be thoroughly pleased with this game, and so it has my recommendation - if you can put up with the bullshit that comes with it.